An honest review of the 'Zippety Crome Thing' aka the Ninja Foodi

 If you are familiar with the classics, you should immediately recognize our family's pet name for the Ninja Foodi, but if you were so unfortunate at not to grow up with Satudary morning cartoons, namely the original animated Garfield and Friends (think 1989 here!) then I am truly sorry for you but happily you can redress this terrible wrong and find it on DVD for a reasonable price (there I go dating myself again!). I didn't know this thing was actually Crome until I opened the box, but before it ever got shipped to our house we had already christened it, and no, sadly I am not an affiliate who gets paid for this sort of thing or gets free kitchen gadgets for reviews, rather I'm just a hungry slub with a family to feed.

I wasn't sure what to expect, as like the original, it slices, it dices, what doesn't it do?  The story behind the fabulous name stems from one Roy the Rooster, a rascal and a rogue, trying to get his friends' money back after they were swindled by another rascal and rogue.  He enacted a live action infomercial for 'the zippety Crome thing' and convinced the scoundrel he couldn't live without one, thus selling him an empty shell and retrieving the stolen money.  The story behind my personal investment therein was simply seeing one in action at a friend's house and becoming curious.  I had no interest in either an air fryer or an instant pot but the combination was intriguing.  Then I saw they were drastically reduced in price of late and decided to try it.

I'm not much of an appliance or gadget person.  If something is going to take up counter space it needs to earn its keep.  This thing is 20+ pounds and involves water and grease, it's a monster and no little hand mixer that will tuck nicely in a cupboard.  It was time to put it to the test.

First off, don't connect it to the same electrical circuit as your microwave (or other major appliance) and run them both at the same time or you'll trip the breaker!

I tried the proof function, as I bake a lot of bread, and wasn't really impressed.  It maxes out at 90F whereas I preheat my oven to 165 and turn it off.  My bread didn't rise noticeably in an hour and a half whereas the oven gets it done in 45 minutes.  It is also pretty small so you'd have to do half a loaf at a time.

I don't like it for grains/pasta either, especially if you are trying to do meat and carbs at the same time.  It is either too wet/dry or over/undercooked.

Don't run the steam/bake function for gluten free bread, I think it would be nice for actual wheat bread but gluten free dough is super moist already, but it does a great job if you use the bake function and do small portions like 3-4 bagels, a small focaccia, or dinner rolls.  The crust is crunchy and the inside soft and chewy, definitely a win there.

It doesn't really save time on most things, yes I can bake a bagel in 4 minutes but I can only do 3 at a time thus it still takes 15-20 minutes to bake a whole batch.  If you are going from frozen to done and using the pressure cooker function, yes it will save time, as it is also awesome for bone broth (1 hour versus 12-24 in the crock pot), but for the tender crisp or bake functions or air fry, it doesn't cut any time off.

It doesn't heat up the whole house like the oven does, which is nice in the summer.

It does small batches well, I wish I had one of these when I was single!

It does amazing things with meat!  I love the tender crisp function for just about any meat you can name, especially chicken breasts.  Also great for roasted veggies!

I can 'fry' my chicken without frying my chicken.

You can now have an oven without having to have an oven!  Think camping or small apartment.

I can even 'fry' raised donuts, though they aren't quite as good as truly fried donuts.

The pressure cook setting is amazing for baked apples (5 minutes!).

Overall, I love the thing, and it is a great fit for our family's needs and tastes, but it doesn't quite do everything but what I need it to do it does well!

  

Update

 If you are into gluten free baking (or soluble fiber) you absolutely need to try adding psyllium husk to your favorite recipes, it will revolutionize not just the texture (more like real bread) but also your ability to handle, manipulate, or otherwise torture the dough into croissants, cinnamon rolls, and more!  I've just updated the Haphazard Guide to Gluten Free Baking with a psyllium husk section, including new recipes for Naan and raised donuts.  Give it a try!

The Long Awaited Addendum?

 So after the worldwide lackluster appearance of my first cookbook, I am very pleased to announce the advent of my second (and even more obscure) culinary title: The Haphazard Guide to Gluten Free Baking with Psyllium Husk.  Yes, after a few weeks of dubious flirtation (and lots of baking) I have become an expert (not!) on this very obscure topic.  I'll make an addendum to the original Haphazard Guide as well as release a stand alone cookbooklet.  If you are a fan of fiber or do any gluten free baking, it really is an intriguing ingredient, check it out!

Please note I won't be updating the smashwords version of the original GF Baking Guide as I have struggled with their wonky conversion platform for years.  The draft2digital version has been updated and that is where I also published the psyllium cookbooklet.  The two companies are merging so hopefully there will be a smashwords version without wonky navigation and a psyllium update available sometime this year, but during the transition things are just awkward!

Both versions are out on amazon (the original with update as well as the psyllium stand alone).

Real Fake Pizza, a taste test!

 We went over to someone's house the other night and they bought a gluten free pizza for my son, which was very thoughtful, but the only brand they had at our local store was also a vegan 'meatlovers' pizza with vegan 'cheese and meat' as well.  I had often laughed at the ridiculous idea of a vegan, gf meatlovers pizza but this was my big chance to see how bad it truly was.  I had a dubious flirtation with fake cheese once upon a time, even making my own, but I couldn't stomach the stuff no matter the ingredients, my gut didn't like the consistency so I gave it up, though I did have fairly good success using kappa carrageenan, at least to make it stretchy and chewy rather than mushy which the tapioca starch tends to do.  There is just no replacement for real cheese.  You can make a passable gluten free bread, the crust on the thing was lovely.  The sauce was good.  The onions (the only real topping) were mushy but this was a frozen pizza and they added a nice flavor.  The 'cheese' melted into dubious globs of tapioca starch and was mushy no matter that I put it under the broiler.  The 'meat' was a highly spiced, slightly plasticky substance that looked like pepperoni, sort of like they don't use real food for commercials or movie props or ads but use sturdy, delicious looking stand ins, yum!  My son hated it, my husband said 'it wasn't as bad as he thought it would be,' and I agreed with him though it most certainly didn't agree with me, as I knew it wouldn't but it was for science!

Verdict: stick with real food.  Lose the fake meat and cheese obsession and focus on making actual fruit and vegetables as delectable as possible instead of terraforming a pizza out of tapioca starch and pea protein, which is about as tasty as it sounds, sort of like making food out of play dough and expecting it to taste like the real thing!  This would have been an excellent pizza if they had done a veggie supreme and used real cheese, not vegan but also real pizza.  I don't get this obsession, especially when everyone also insists on organic, non-gmo, and all natural and unprocessed.  This pizza was anything but natural and way too processed, but there is a subset of the population that can eat organic Oreos with a straight face and think it is somehow virtuous or healthy or something!  Maybe they'll eat the leftovers?

Permission to cry

 Do you have any personal tragedies that you won't allow yourself to grieve because the world thinks you're nuts, petty, or ridiculous?  Forget the world and let yourself grieve!  The world is there for you when your parents or children or spouse die but otherwise you are on your own, and even then you only get a three day grace period and then life is back in the fast lane.  But what if you are estranged from your family, had an abusive or absent parent and never got to know what a good dad is, never got to realize your dream of doing X, you just miscarried or can't get pregnant, you have to forego some major and favorite food group due to health reasons...whatever the reason, you are allowed to grieve.  It only adds insult to injury when the world sides against you, not only can you not grieve but they say it is your fault that your mother's abusive or you have nothing to cry about since you never had a relationship with your absent dad and now he's dead so get over it already.  Forget the world's opinions and censure and seek out a good friend who will listen and let you grieve, someone who won't give advice or opinions or trite comfort or criticize you, but just somebody who will have your back even when you are sobbing over never getting to eat real cheese again.  Bottling it up, ignoring it, or lapsing into despair will only make it worse.  You have permission to be human, to hurt, to grieve, to cry, no matter why or what or who.

Listen to the mustn'ts?

 Shel Silverstein penned a little poem that went, 'Listen to the mustn'ts child, listen to the don'ts, listen to the shouldn'ts the impossibles, the won'ts,' and then it goes on to say, "anything can happen, child anything can be!"  While there are obviously restrictions to 'anything,' such as walking to Mars or flying by flapping your arms, in general he makes an excellent point, especially if you go online looking for information about any particular sort of health topic or lifestyle or diet.  My biggest advice to new moms is disconnect your internet, as it will only make you crazy or neurotic!

I'm already on a very restricted diet, have limited energy, and sometimes just feel downright lousy, and now I have a fully body attack of eczema: itchy!  So I hope on google to figure out what is going on and how to stop it...bad idea!  Every article says something different, especially if they are selling supplements or coaching expertise.  From what I could gather, you basically can't eat anything but kale and salmon for the rest of your life and you are a terrible person for eating anything non-organic, gmo, grains, sweeteners (real or artificial), any fat but olive oil or coconut, dairy, most fruit...or pretty much anything except kale since salmon is obviously not vegan so you can't eat that either?  I was actually losing weight earlier this year because I just didn't want to eat, couldn't make myself eat, couldn't get enough calories because of my dietary restrictions.  And I can't even eat kale because it ranks right up there with wheat on my food sensitivity list, what do I eat, rocks?

I need to cut back on the sugar, that's probably what triggered this eczema flare-up, but I'm not sure I can cut it completely out of my diet as I have so much other stuff, there is literally nothing left!  The whole thing made me rather depressed and nigh on despair, I know I can't live like that, but the pictures of all these scrawny smiling women and their patented gut repair systems just might guilt me into it.  You can't just make broad and sweeping claims about diet and gut issues, inflammatory disease and food sensitivity, everybody's issues are different.  Saying dairy and wheat (or whatever) are toxins that nobody should eat and the main problem doesn't help anybody.  Individuals need help, not a list of nos they can't live with, otherwise they'll just give up before they begin or sink into even worse eating habits.  And what about the stuff that's okay on one site but anathema on another?  What about those of us who can't eat kale or any source of carbs but oats?  Where can you find some of this stuff if you don't live in a posh urban area that caters to the vegan keto crowd?  How can the average Joe afford it?  Why the guilt and condescension to someone who is ill and looking for answers?  Just buy my system/supplement and your problems are over, except a dozen other people say the same thing with different stuff, who is right?

Ignore the self-proclaimed experts.  Find community and support.  Find a doctor that will listen and work with you.  Do what works for you, no matter how many internet gurus say it will kill you!  Consider your quality of life, can you and will you eat something every day for the rest of your life?  If you can't stand kale, don't be guilted into eating it.  Also make changes gradually, pick one monster and attack that before going after the whole ravening hoard.  Allow yourself to grieve, it is okay to feel sad that you can't eat cheese.  Find alternatives that work for you and you actually enjoy.  Learn to cook and shop based on your dietary needs, personal tastes, and budget: learn to enjoy the hunt, the joy of a new culinary skill or recipe, instead of focusing so much on diet, focus on the process.  Be careful with supplements, they can have side effects and weird interactions with one another, some may help but some may also cause problems.  Take it slow, give yourself time to learn new skills, grieve, to adjust to new things.  Most of all, stay hopeful, remind yourself of the small victories, surround yourself with supportive people, and remember it is a journey not a destination.  And you don't have to drink a salmon and kale smoothie to get there!

The effect of fat type, dough temperature, mixing method, baking time, and percentage flour content on texture, thickness, and taste in gluten free cookies.

 If the onerous title sounds a trifle scientific, that was the point.  We've been having an enforced snow-cation the last couple days and I was out of cookies, so I whipped up a couple batches and thought I'd play with a few variables to see what actually makes a difference in gf cookies.  I used the same recipe but varied some of the variables to see what would happen: oil vs plant butter, room temperature dough vs. refrigerated dough, cream the fat/sugar or just mix it until combined, a slightly sticky dough or a stiff, dry dough, and varying the length of time in the oven.  I ended up with about eight different experimental doughs and baked them in various combinations and carefully assessed the results, which were interesting.

I discovered that chilling the dough does nothing for gf cookies using 100% oat flour and a little xanthin gum (along with real sugar and eggs).  Neither does creaming the butter/sugar.  I used oil in half the dough and plant butter in the rest, to see if that made a difference.  The cookies were a bit thicker with the solid fat (could also use coconut oil, lard, shortening, or real butter) but I found the taste less pleasing for some reason (though I have been using canola oil for my cookies lately so it may just be a personal thing in this case) whereas the oil cookies tended to spread more and were a little thinner.  Liquid vegetable oil is a lot cheaper than plant butter or shortening right now, hence my preference for canola oil at the moment.  I also found that under baking the cookies, no matter which dough was used, made for thinner, uglier cookies, but over baking makes them too crispy.  Adding extra oat flour made for nice looking cookies but they were a bit on the dry side.

Overall results: gf oat flour cookies can be made with oil and still achieve satisfactory results.  Chilling the dough or creaming the fat/sugar doesn't improve the end result.  Baking the cookies until they just begin to brown around the edges and crack on the top and then allowing to cool several minutes on the baking sheet give the best results.  Adding enough oat flour to make a thick, slightly sticky dough results in a chewy cookie with the appropriate texture but too much makes it dry and too little will make it run all over the baking sheet.